You don’t even need to go that far back. Theranos imploded after they were exposed doing this kind of stuff.

I think technically that’s right, although practically it’s hard to envision something that would fail Frye but pass Daubert. It’d have to be a something that has such overwhelmingly strong indicia of reliability that it can overcome the fact that it’s not yet generally accepted.

But I would love for @kenwhite.bsky.social to explain to me why that view is naive and wrong.

Granddaughter, I think (not that it makes a huge difference).

It’s “creative lawyering” in the same sense that the Torture Memos were creative lawyering, in that anything is possible when you “knowingly fail[] to provide a thorough, objective,and candid interpretation of the law” (as the 2009 DOJ OPR report found John Yoo and Jay Bybee did).

Also worth pointing out that when a real threat did come to the Shire (in the form of Saruman and the Scouring), it was Frodo, Sam, Merry, and Pippin who drove it off all on their own. No “hard men” necessary!

The Hobbits are able to live their simple bucolic lifestyle largely because the Shire is west of the Misty Mountains and the vast majority of the major threats are to the east. The whole point was that they were literally geographically isolated from the danger and it was somebody else’s problem!

This exact fact pattern is SHOCKINGLY common. For example, both Eric Clapton & Jack Nicholson discovered as adults that the people they were raised believing were their parents were actually their grandparents & the woman they thought was their older sister was actually their biological mother.

Isn’t the more cynical interpretation that Kacsmaryk recognizes (correctly) that allowing this would open up Texas’s redistricting to a similar attack and he doesn’t want that?

I was primarily thinking about stopping police departments and other state law enforcement entities from, eg, buying body armor from the same companies that supply ICE, but there‘s really no reason not to extend it to any government purchases.

I mean, barely a year and a half ago Sliwa and his Guardian Angel goons beat a man on live TV after they falsely accused him of being a migrant simply because he spoke Spanish. Functionally indistinguishable from what ICE is doing. apnews.com/article/guar...

It’s like saying that Mel Brook’s “The Producers” is bad because it does it really have anything at all to say about the horrors of the Holocaust when that was very much Not The Point. The point was to show Hitler and the Nazis as the ridiculous bunch of fucking clowns that they were.

Yeah, that’s the obvious explanation. I read somewhere that the prior iteration of the UK protest a few months ago called it a “No Tyrants” protest because they didn’t want to come off as anti-monarchy. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t a sense of irony and humor to it.